Storyline 3 - Telephone Numbers Disappear in IE

When you insert a telephone number (or a series of numbers with dashes that resemble a telephone number) in a SL3 project, after publishing and viewing in IE11, the telephone number appears, then disappears onscreen.  If you have the number in the slide notes, it completely removes the number and the characters after it are displaced.  Is this a bug?  This does not happen in SL2.

30 Replies
Scott Calvin

Hi Ashley (or any staff that happen to see this),

I know this is an old thread, but was this ever resolved? I'm having the exact same issue (disappearing phone numbers in IE) when viewing the html5 version. (launched locally) It doesn't do it in Chrome, and it doesn't do it when I launch the Flash version in IE. 

Any insight would be appreciated.


- Scott

Ashley Terwilliger

Hi Scott,

Are you also using Storyline 3, as Steve was? I didn't hear any further from him about this - but since you're launching it locally I'd also suggest testing how it behaves when uploading to your server or LMS. If you aren't ready to load it up to a live environment you could always use your web content and upload to Tempshare. 

Leslie McKerchie

Oh no, sorry to hear that Maryam.

Looking back, we haven't been able to track this one down or replicate. You mention it's happening to some of you, so that makes it difficult as well.

Does it happen consistently for the same users at least? If you upload to SCORM Cloud, do they experience a similar result?

Crystal Horn

Hi there, Neil.  We'd be happy to have a look at your video!  If you could share your .story file, too, we can test and see if we can reproduce this issue.  Use this link to share privately with us.

To confirm, it sounds like phone numbers either on the slide or in your slide notes are disappearing after a few seconds on screen.  Is this happening once your course is hosted online?

Crystal Horn

Just an update, Neil was able to see the same behavior on his end when I published and hosted his course files in a few learning management system environments.  I did not see the same behavior in my version of IE.  Like Steve, the original author, mentions - this behavior seems specific to the environment in which the course is being viewed.

I'm sharing this information with our team so we can ultimately determine if there is a local network setting that is interfering with numbers displaying.  We'll keep you posted!

Crystal Horn

Update: It looks like a Skype browser extension might have been at play here!

 From Neil (great work, thanks for sharing!):

An interesting development is that a co-worker (thanks Steve) did some research on this issue and found a similar thread on the articulate storyline support site ( ). Given that information and the apparent root cause, I tried disabling my Skype add-ons in IE11. The result was that the phone numbers no longer disappeared! The solution for me (still to implement this) appears to be inserting 'em dash' where I have regular dashes. So I'll have to try that and see how it affects the course.

Craig Polak

Happy to have ran across this "dated" thread. I just experienced this very issue. All is fine on my end as the course author, whether previewing in SL 360 or viewing via web link. But, other folks have the phone numbers disappear after a second or two, while still others have the phone numbers remain on the screen. We're running IE 11. I'll check the Skype article and report back.

It's been driving us bonkers why that happens.